Yes, you do.

Here in the euroland where we do not know what "cheque" means all that can be paid online, no problem. Or in bill-payment ATM. Heck, my biggest complaint is that the health care services does not let you set up automatic billing so I actually have to pay online every 20€ GP visit separately..

Hmm. Here in Finland you can actually (*gasp*) call DHL and set up the package to be delivered to you at work. I regularly order stuff that does not fit mailbox to myself at work, the reception is there always at working hours and so on and so forth.

Also they do try several times to deliver it. UPS is a bit worse, they only leave a note after several failed attempts at delivery (because I was at work..), DHL does that right away.

Paying bills on a machine was exciting enough in early 90s but online banking beats that hands down without trying. For one thing, no waiting in a bloody line to pay your bills.

Umm. No. Since most of the world can handle electronic cash transfers between banks without any hassle, there's hardly any creativity involved. Just copy the system of your preference from another country.

In most reasonable countries you can make money transfers between private accounts in an ATM. So if you're making a deal, take the guy to the ATM and give/show him the receipt of the transfer. Plus, you're going to make any deal involving reasonable money in writing, right? You can naturally do this online as well if you preferer.

Most commercial bills come with a pre-filled form you can take to a bank (if you're a granny with technophobia) or pay it on a machine or online. Bill has necessary details to make the bank transfer and a reference number that the recipients automated billing system can recognize.

In practise any semi-decent bank will let you set up a recurring payment to a private account as well so you don't have to bother to remember to do it every time when the rent is due.

Paper trail? Old fashioned people get a statement once a month on paper, rest have online account management which shows transfers for last 2 years or whatever. (and up to 5 years for a fee).

What's hard is waiting in line to turn in some daft piece of paper which is then scanned and sent as an image to a check clearing house.. At least these days they don't apparently send the physical piece around anymore which means your money is in limbo for weeks.

Amen brother. And for us old farts, we tried Linux before google existed. Think about that for a second and you may start to understand where some well founded antipathy to linux community comes from.

The only reasonable way to figure out linux and/or university HP-UX was to get some reference books. This task was made easier of course by the borderline linux gurus who hated books and would abuse anyone asking for a good reference book.

By personal first experience with world of unix was HP-UX system not. configured. at. all. for. users. Just imagine a poor sod who tries to write email with elm and they are dumped into vi. Ha-ha. Being old school geek type I persevered and eventually found a guy from another university who had written short pamflet about how to set up some basic things such as setting up EMACS with reasonable defaults and support for national characters. Emacs is hardly wonderful but if your choices are vi and Emacs, at least you have fighting chance with the latter.

So I learned and figured out how to do things but all the while I had ever-increasing feeling "This is stupid. I have other things to do with my time." and eventually this contributed to my choice to pursue career of electronics design, not computer science.

Personally I jumped into NT bandwagon when W2k came out and never really looked back. I had for a while a linux server box running at home but I figured out I'm getting very modest benefit for a lot of work and replaced the damn thing with an ADSL router that can do the firewall-bit without me fiddling with obscure router rulesets.

I did another foray with trying to set up a HTPC running on linux year'n'half ago but after 2 weeks of wasted vacation time trying to get the damn thing play ball I just had to give up. Linux audio support ha-ha-ha... I had XP HTPC with DVBViewer running pretty within the same day I started installing from scratch. Yes, it was existing leftover parts box, not one bought with careful research to provide linux compatibility but I never had to bother with that with windows.

You, sir, combine ignorance and arrogance into one efficient package.

There was NO Lend-Lease material delivered to reds before 1942. None, Zero, Nada, Zilch.

In other words US materiel got forwarded to soviets after they proved to the world they could take everything nazis could thrown at them head on .. and scraped by the skin of their prick to not collapse.

Moreover the more significant part of the aid was actually in stuff like trucks, tires, railroad rails and so on. Soviet tanks, planes and arms were just better at nazi killing than the US counterparts of the time.

To wit, soviets made hell of a lot more germans die for the Vaterland than Amis.

[/offtopic]

Ahem. As a guy who did use OS/2 for several years doing fairly geeky stuff all the time, I beg to differ on that. OS/2 just blew the pants off W95 in stability with zero contest. I had uptimes of several weeks quite commonly.

The SIQ issue was bad but it got as good patch/workaround as was possible without rewriting an asynchronous queue. I do not remember anymore if it happened in 3.0 or on some 2.1 service pack.

A bigger problem was the system level unability to terminate a misbehaving application. I usually had to finally reboot when enough zombie apps were sucking system resources that were for all intents and purposes unkillable.

Pls do not claim there was magic software z that would fix it, none of them worked even 50% of the time.

"compatibility" is a nebulous quantity as you should know. See for reference "Is year XXXX year of the Linux on desktop" -nonsense.

Graphics card device driver support thoroughly sucked on OS/2 and considering the cards of that time were mostly simple frame buffer affairs it's saying something.

Actually towards the end OS/2 got really good at running windows software. There was a project that made an executable converter that would take regular Win32 app and make OS/2 exe out of it. Obviously the problem is how do you get the darn Office installed in the 1st place..

Also there was a blatant sabotage on Microsoft's part with the abortion of 32bit extension for Win 3.1 family - They came up with an update that just basically irreversibly broke windows 3.1 software under OS/2..

WRT OS/2 3.0, yeah, NT is pretty solid design on technical viewpoint. But damn it was a resource hog back in the day. And it took more than ten years to break into the Desktop with Windows XP.

With regards to AI, consider the consequences of being able to create "human level" AI without understanding how it works; How long until our wayward children would have surpassed and replaced us?

Especially assuming the starting point is a self-learning neural net that will attain consciousness. Nothing to stop a machine from "growing" new "neurons".

Beyond stuff that you can do in free fall that'd be difficult/impossible in 1G, there's truckload of money to be grabbed. As soon as you can extract useful resources from moon and later, asteroid belt, sky's the proverbial limit.

One obvious moneymaker would be of course manufacturing more spaceships. It's the whole pyramid cost structure - Setting up that 1st space ship factory is astronomically (ha) expensive but each step after that costs less and less while the profits grow inversely.

Rocket equation for moon is just way different for rocket equation for earth. And once you can drag heavy metals from asteroid belt you have unlimited resources for practical foreseeable future.

But, yes, in quaterly fiscal thinking, there's no money to be made.

Oh! Oh! I know this!

It's called nucular-something!

As a heavy user of zinc-air batteries, I can spoil the party for all of you. Zinc-air and likely Lithium-Air batteries are great for energy storage where you need high size/energy ratio.

What they absolutely suck on is self-discharging. Your average zinc-air hearing air battery will discharge in about a week exposed to oxygen. So these lithium-air batteries would probably come with a tape sealing the terminal and as soon as you remove it, it will start discharging.

This would pretty much sabotage applications where you would prefer regular batteries over rechargeable ones right now. Namely clocks, remotes and so on, which are supposed to run on a single set of batteries for more than a year.

The other side of the coin is that by demonizing the practise you're making men with constriction or other problems in their wiener much much less likely to get help.

As a guy who got chopped at adult age (30ish) I very much prefer the lack of pain, bleeding sores and other assorted fun afterwards. Only regret is I didn't have it done 10 years earlier + doctors asshole attitude prevalent over here (europe) due to the propaganda blowing downsides all out of proportion.

Nb. Following pertains to european regulations. Yes, it's the continent not on same map page as US.

On the subject of auditing machines and devices, now the demand is suddenly the auditor/inspector has personally checked every single critical component making up the elevator? And their installation?

Right. Maybe Superman with his X-Ray vision could give decent go-ahead on an installation with superficial examination and checking the paperwork. Ordinary people obviously can't.

However much you'd love to shift the blame, it's still the responsibility of the manufacturer and installer of the elevator that the elevator is safe to use. Auditors can only verify the company manufactoring practices and QA are according to the required standards. On paper.

What this auditing and certifying actually does is alleviate the blame on the people doing the installation. If there's an accident, you can be sure the setup will be examined thoroughly to find out what exactly went wrong and why. But someone can be actually sued if it can be demonstrated there was criminal negligence or fraudulent practices.

In any case systems like elevators have huge safety margins and strict regulation. Whereas contruction industry as a whole is known for integrity and following standards to the letter (cough) consequences for using substandard equipment or installations where people are liable to be hurt or killed are fairly severe.

After all strict quality management practices and certifications exist so that manufacturers and builders are not able to endanger lives as a cost cutting measure.

Accidents do happen and then there is a chain of blame and it's not not usually the auditor or inspector ending up holding the bag. Supervisors are far more likely to get the blame who actually oversee the construction.

I'm not American for sure. But coming from a protestant country I resent your sweeping stereotyping of protestant people. Of course the very term "protestant" is somewhat fuzzy and misleading. Protestant movement invoved many factions such as lutherians (that would be the nordic countries) who were pretty much live and let live kind of ideology. However, Luther's peers Zwingli, Calvin and the ilk thought moderates are just too soft and pliable so they went ahead with their own crackpot zealot view of things. To put things into perspective full half of german region's population was butchered due to violence between hardliner protestants and catholics during the reformation.

I'm too lazy to look up proper terminology but you have reformist protestants on the extremist end and whole mess of spin-offs who also had ties with each other so the whole protestant "scene" is pretty darn amorphous. British (anglicans) indeed kicked out the zealot troublemakers to US. Or rather "encouraged" them to pack their things.

Calvin and the boys would be organizing suicide bombings if they lived today and you do _not_ want such people living next door.

So summa summarum, I'm an atheist living in a country with protestant state religion and I can say at least 75% of people here see creationism ans nonsense. Society is very secular in any case with strong separation between church and state.

"It was a rubber tree"

Darn I laughed so hard 1st time.